Launched in May 1999, it was first owned by a company called FAST and was also
known by that name. In 2003, it was purchased by Overture which
was then purchased by Yahoo!. In March 2004, AlltheWeb,
as searchers had come to know it, ceased to exist. Although AlltheWeb is
still out there, it's not the same search engine. Many of the
advanced search features have disappeared. Its database has been replaced
with a version of the Yahoo! search engine database.
Actually, searching the same database at Yahoo! oftenbrings more
results than searching it at AlltheWeb.
was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in December 1995. The first
search engine to devise a way to store every word of every HTML page on the
Internet in a fast, searchable index, it immediately became the search engine of
choice. Within a few years, however, it had morphed into a combination
search engine/subject directory and lost its sharp search focus. Recently,
it returned to its origins, presenting a clean, unclutted interface with
attractive colors. Unfortunately, as
another of Yahoo's acquisitions, it has suffered the same fate as AlltheWeb. It's
still out there, but there have been many search feature changes, and the results are
now basically the same as AlltheWeb.
was founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, CA.
It was originally designed to answer simple questions posed in everyday natural language. In practice,
it was limited in what it could deliver and, in time, became overshadowed by more energetic systems
that incorporated keyword searching techniques (like Google). In 2001, Ask Jeeves
partnered with Teoma, a powerful keyword search engine developed by Apostolos Gerasoulis, a computer
science professor at Rutgers University. But even this addition couldn't save it. On February 27, 2006, having
suffered the loss of many of its users, Ask
Jeeves was finally laid to rest. Similarly, on February 26, 2006, Teoma disappeared. It now redirects
to the Ask.com search engine.
Other Dead Search Engines
NBCi (formerly Snap)
Some of these databases retain their names and may still be accessible on the
Web; but their original
indexes have been replaced by other database indexes, such as Yahoo! or Ask.com.
For more information, go to Wikipedia on the Web .